Speaker
Description
The bilingualized learner’s dictionary (BLD) combines elements of the monolingual and bilingual dictionaries (MDs and BDs, respectively). A BLD is normally compiled on the basis of an already existing learner’s MD (Cowie 1999) by supplementing the original monolingual entries with a translational equivalent in the learner’s mother tongue. It is believed that the addition of the equivalent provides confirmation to those learners who do not understand fully the definition or even when they do, they still find it difficult to identify the object or concept being defined. This confirmatory effect seems to be especially needed in the cases of definitions written with a restricted defining vocabulary because such definitions are often criticized for being imprecise and vague. Thus it seems reasonable to claim that L1 equivalents may remedy the deficiency of such definitions. The present paper examines the discriminatory power of a BLD, as compared with a learner’s MD, in the context of several near-synonyms of the verb laugh. 142 undergraduate students of English Studies were asked to complete several sentences (a modified cloze test) by filling blanks with the near-synonyms. Some of the students had access to the original LDOCE entries for these words, while others used BLD entries (LDOCE plus equivalents). The study shows that the BLD users achieved slightly higher scores in the test than the LDOCE users, but the difference could be due to chance because it was not statistically significant. On the basis of this study one cannot generalize to the whole population of learners by claiming that BLDs are more helpful than learner’s MDs in discriminating between near-synonyms in cloze tests.
